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Kill Bill: Vol. 1
Kill Bill: Volume 1 is a 2003 martial arts film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. It stars Uma Thurman as The Bride, who swears revenge on a team of assassins and their leader, Bill. Tarantino conceived Kill Bill as an homage to grindhouse cinema, including martial arts films, samurai cinema, blaxploitation films, and spaghetti Westerns. Summary A woman in a wedding dress, The Bride, lies wounded in a chapel in El Paso, Texas, having been attacked by the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. She tells their leader, Bill, that she is pregnant with his baby just a second too late before he shoots her in the head. Four years later, having survived the attack, the Bride goes to the home of Vernita Green, planning to kill her. Both women were members of the assassination squad, which has since disbanded; Vernita now leads a normal suburban family life. They engage in a knife fight, but are interrupted by the arrival of Vernita's young daughter, Nikki. The Bride agrees to meet Vernita at night to settle the matter, but when Vernita tries to surprise the Bride with a pistol hidden in a box of cereal, the Bride dodges the shot and throws a knife into Vernita's chest, killing her. Four years earlier, police investigate the massacre at the wedding chapel. The sheriff discovers the Bride is alive but comatose. In the hospital, Deadly Viper Elle Driver prepares to assassinate the Bride via lethal injection, but Bill aborts the mission at the last moment, considering it dishonorable to kill the Bride when she cannot defend herself. The Bride later awakens from her four-year coma and is horrified to find she is no longer pregnant. She kills a man who tries to rape her and a hospital worker who has been selling her body while she was comatose. She then takes the hospital worker's truck, and teaches herself to walk again. Resolving to kill Bill and all four members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, she picks her first target: O-Ren Ishii, now the leader of the Tokyo yakuza. O-Ren's parents were murdered by the yakuza when she was a child; she took vengeance on the yakuza boss and replaced him after training as an elite assassin. The Bride travels to Okinawa, Japan, to obtain a sword from legendary swordsmith Hattori Hanzo, who has sworn never to forge a sword again. After learning that her target is Bill, his former student, he relents and crafts his finest sword for her. The Bride tracks down O-Ren at a Tokyo restaurant, the House of Blue Leaves, defeating and killing her entire yakuza army, including the elite Crazy 88 and O-Ren's bodyguard, schoolgirl Gogo Yubari. She duels with O-Ren in the restaurant's Japanese garden before gaining the upper hand and slicing the top of her head off with a sword stroke. She tortures Sofie Fatale, O-Ren's assistant, for information about Bill, and leaves her alive as a threat. Later, Bill asks Sofie if the Bride knows her daughter is alive. Cast * Uma Thurman as The Bride * Lucy Liu as O-Ren Ishii * David Carradine as Bill * Vivica A. Fox as Vernita Green * Michael Madsen as Budd * Daryl Hannah as Elle Driver * Julie Dreyfus as Sofie Fatale * Sonny Chiba as Hattori Hanzo * Chiaki Kuriyama as Gogo Yubari * Gordon Liu as Johnny Mo * Michael Parks as Earl McGraw * Michael Bowen as Buck * Jun Kunimura as Boss Tanaka * Kenji Ohba as Shiro * James Parks as Edgar McGraw * Jonathan Loughran as Trucker Client Trivia * Despite being bleeped out, the name of The Bride is revealed on her plane tickets. * As Quentin Tarantino was leaving Japan, he heard the band "The 5,6,7,8's" playing. He was so intrigued by the music that he asked a clerk who the band was. When he was told, Tarantino, who didn't have enough time to go to a music shop to get their CD, begged the clerk to sell him their copy. Quentin took the disc home, listened to it, and immediately signed the band to play in the film. * Quentin Tarantino only had Uma Thurman in mind to play The Bride. * Quentin Tarantino owns the "Pussy Wagon" and drove it everyday to promote Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004). * The black & white sequence was only used to avoid an NC-17 rating. * Approximately sixty thousand dollars of the budget was used on swords and accessories. * The finale took eight weeks to shoot. * Quentin Tarantino was a big fan of the Japanese movie Battle Royale (2000), so he cast Chiaki Kuriyama (who played Takako Chigusa) as Gogo Yubari. * This film and Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) are the only Quentin Tarantino films with no use of the "N" word. * The original trailer for this film, although featuring no actual bloodshed, raised the ire of the MPAA with the sight of The Bride's blood-stained clothes. As such it became the first to be subjected to the MPAA's new "no blood" policy for trailers, in which all sight of the bodily fluid must be alternately colored or removed entirely. This is why the trailers for this film feature The Bride's clothes covered in blackish-brown stains where the blood would be. Incidentally, the color of dried blood is blackish-brown, which means that the MPAA unknowingly made Tarantino change the color from fresh blood to that of dried blood.